Promoting Korean Food, Intro: I’m Your Market

A few years ago I was asked to write a small book on promoting Korean food. I finished the manuscript, but it never got published. The publisher ended up going out of business. Here is the old manuscript for your enjoyment, posted in segments. Keep in mind that this was written in late 2011, but some parts are still relevant today.

Promoting Korean Food

Introduction

I’m Your Market

Journalists sometimes call me an expert on Korean food. It’s embarrassing because I’m not an expert. Before I moved to Korea in 2004, I barely knew anything about Korean food. That was one of the main reasons I moved to Korea. I started my blog ZenKimchi as soon as I arrived, and I blogged about the food I was eating because no one else was doing it. There were no Korean food blogs back then.

When the American media and foodies started to get interested in Korean food, ZenKimchi was still the only blog talking about it. This was long before the big hansik campaigns were started. We were alone in promoting Korean food abroad, and we have been doing it for almost a decade.

Yet again, I’m not an expert. You may say, “Why should I read what you’re writing, Joe?”

I’m your market.

I’m the person you want to reach. I did not grow up with Korean food, so I have no childhood programming and am not eating Korean food out of sentiment. I studied Korean history in university and came to Korea because I love the history and because out of all the cuisines I’ve eaten and cooked, Korean cuisine was a big black hole. I knew nothing beyond kimchi, and the kimchi I ate in America was awful. Because of this, my impressions of Korean food are similar to what your average American’s impressions will be.

I have been blogging about Korean food since 2004. As part of what I do, I keep in touch with all the news and opinions people have of Korean food all over the world. I have Internet “bots” tracking down every news story and blog post talking about Korean food, and I read them. I keep track of what average people say about Korean food on social networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter. Because of my constant research I have a general understanding of what foreigners think about Korean food, what they like and don’t like, what campaigns work and which don’t.

The first and hardest concept to understand when promoting Korean food to westerners is that it’s not a user-friendly cuisine. Many people don’t instantly like Korean food. It’s an acquired taste. People have to try it a few times and get a taste for it before they like it. It’s not instantly enjoyable like, say, pizza. Yet that is also one of Korean cuisine’s strengths. That’s because acquired tastes become the most cherished tastes. Think of a food that you like that you didn’t like at first. Chances are that once you learned to like it, it became one of your favorite foods.

In my research on foreigners’ impressions of Korean food, that has been a definite pattern. Rarely do foreigners instantly like kimchi. It takes them a while. When they learn to like it, it becomes one of their favorite foods.

Personally, I was disappointed with Korean food when I first arrived. But that was because I didn’t understand it. I had no one to guide me through it. I ate samgyeopsal straight from the grill without salt or ssamjang and was disappointed at how bland it was. I ate dried anchovies without rice and was turned off by how sweet and fishy they were. I ate kimchi directly from the jar as a snack with nothing else, cringing at the sourness.

I found that others were having similar bad experiences. In fact, you’d go on popular expat Internet cafes and hear people passionately talk about how they hate Korean food. I started to become one of those people.

Then something changed.

During my third month in Korea, after struggling with downing Korean food every day, I showed up at work one morning. My stomach rumbled for some breakfast. But my tongue had a strange new feeling. My friend Brant suggested we go pick up some breakfast. He said, “What do you want?”

“Brant, you won’t believe it. I’m craving kimchi.”

Gradually, the foods I could barely stand became foods I badly wanted. It took me a couple of years to like doenjang jjigae. When I tried a bowl of it that came from very old doenjang, it started to grow on me. I had the epiphany that doenjang was very similar to cheese in that it was fermented protein, and it tasted better and more complex with age. When I discovered this, I savored doenjang in all forms and even became a fan of cheonggukjang.

These days I like Korean foods that even some Koreans don’t like—samhap, gobchang gwi. I’ve even gotten my Korean wife to try Korean dishes that even she had never eaten or enjoyed before. There are still a few foods I have a hard time enjoying, particularly the blander foods like nureungjitang and juk. I’m not a big fan of haemultang because I feel the spices cover up the delicate flavors of the shellfish and boiling them makes their soft textures too rubbery. Yet I still eat them when they’re put in front of me because I know that if I learn to like it I will learn to love it.

I find that since Korean cuisine is not user friendly, it speaks to foreigners differently. Everyone has a different taste. Each foreigner has a different dish she absolutely loves. I have known foreigners who were obsessed over individual foods like mu-ssam, naengmyeon, and tteok. Yet one of them hated seafood. Another hated eating communally (she was disgusted that people put their spoons in the same soup). Another was a vegetarian. Another had a gluten allergy. Everyone is different, so that makes it more of a challenge to market Korean food to foreigners. There’s no magic dish that everyone is going to like.

I may sound harsh in my writings, but that is because I love Korea, and I love Korean food. I want Korean food to become popular, and I don’t want Korea to become embarrassed by making awkward mistakes in marketing. I’m going to sound harsh because the methods the big players have been using have been humiliating Korea and have been wasting its hard-earned wealth. My little website, which only costs a couple hundred dollars a year to maintain, has had about as much success—actually, it’s had more success—in promoting Korean food than the other organizations spending millions of dollars a year. WhenThe New York Times,The Wall Street Journal,Lonely Planet, and other media outlets want to produce something about Korean food, they tend to consult ZenKimchi first, not the official hansik promoters. That’s because we have marketed Korean food efficiently. We don’t have a big budget, so we don’t throw money at solutions.

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About The Author

Joe McPherson founded ZenKimchi in 2004. He has been featured and sourced in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, CNN, KBS, MBC, SBS, Le Figaro, Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia, Harper’s Bazaar Korea, The Chosun Weekly, and other Korean and international media. He has consulted for "Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain," The Travel Channel’s “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern,” Lonely Planet, National Geographic, Conde Nast Traveler, the PBS documentary series “Kimchi Chronicles,” and other projects in the UK, Canada, and Australia featuring celebrity chefs such as Gizzi Erskine and Gary Mehigan.
Mr. McPherson has written for multiple Korean and international publications, including SEOUL Magazine, JoongAng Daily, The Korea Herald, Newsweek Korea and wrote the feature article for U.S. National publication Plate magazine’s all-Korean food issue. He has acted as dining editor for 10 Magazine and was on the judging panel for Korea for the Miele Guide.
He spoke at TEDx Seoul on Korean food globalization, at TED Worldwide Talent Search on the rise of Korean cuisine, and in New York City on Korean Buddhist temple cuisine. The company ZenKimchi International organizes food tours for tourists and corporations and acts as a media liaison for foreign and Korean media and local restaurants and producers.